Lauren Burkitt

Two Feminine Benefits of Probiotics | Clean’s the New Black.

25th November, 2015

Hi there! I’m Jena, guest posting from the holistic lifestyle blog, Clean’s the New Black. I am an RN who is driven to educate people about wellness and staying disease free. Everyday at work I see the ravages our toxic environments are taking on us and believe we can all become our healthiest by living a natural toxin-free lifestyle. By detoxing our surroundings, beauty routines, and bodies we can achieve vivacious health.

Probiotics For Two Embarrassing Feminine Issues

I am sure we’ve all heard of probiotics. We drink them in Kombucha, eat them in real sauerkraut, and swallow them in pill form. Probiotics are incredibly important in maintaining our health and everyone can benefit from them.

Probiotics offer our guts a healthy dose of good bacteria that work to defend the GI system against bad bacteria and toxins. In turn this strengthens our immunity, decreases risk for all autoimmune diseases, stabilizes our mood, stops allergies, helps balance hormones, and heals our sick guts. Just research the importance of our microbiome to our general wellbeing and you will be shocked how vitally important it is.

Most of us know that we can take probiotics to help reduce gas and bloating, keep bowels regular, and improve digestion. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg — probiotics help us in many more ways than this. And two hush-hush issues they tackle are urinary tract and yeast infections.

Urinary Health

There’s nothing like a burning fiery feeling during urination to stop you in your tracks. How many of you know what I’m talking about?

A urinary tract infection (UTI), the miserable no good pee every 30 minutes and still feel like you need to go feeling. Ignore it and it will turn into a kidney infection and potentially take your life. Take antibiotics for it and the problem is only perpetuated setting your up for UTI after UTI, never to treat the real problem going on…bacterial imbalance.

Did you know that taking probiotics orally helps to balance the bacteria in our urinary system and in turn prevent UTI’s?! If you are a frequent UTI sufferer I urge you to look into taking a specific targeted probiotic for urinary health. It does wonders to help heal an active infection quickly and keep new ones at bay.

Look for a brand that contains D-mannose (the reason we’re told to drink real cranberry juice with a UTI) in the formula. What’s so special about D-mannose is it sticks to the lining of the bladder and ureters to stop bad bacteria for adhering there…which prevents infection. Also, you’ll want certain strains of bacteria in the probiotic, specifically Lactobacillus rhamnosus and Lactobacillus reuteri which have shown in many studies (like this one) to prevent UTI’s in women.

The secret is that specific types of bacteria need to be taken in order to be effective. You can’t just take your daily gut health probiotic and think your covered. This is the brand I always turn to to help.

Feminine Health

Another all too common plague for women is — ear muffs to the little ones reading — vaginal infections. Yeast infections are mainstays in some women’s lives, causing anxiety, stress, and the obvious miserable discomfort. Heck, some of my friends have had them so bad they had to take off work until they recovered. I don’t know about you but if I am going to cash in on my sick days I’d rather it be that I’m not “really” sick. So, I’ll let you in on a little secret about how to keep those sick days to yourself…take probiotics specifically for feminine health.

Different than with urinary health, this time the bacteria Lactobacillus plantarum is our friend, as it has shown to reduce discomfort during an infection and prevent new ones, (source). Other bacteria like L. rhamnosus and L. fermentum also support vaginal bacterial balance and reduce the number of candida (yeast) in the vagina. When there are minimal yeast there are fewer, or no, yeast infections. Here is a great meta-analysis of current research supporting probiotics for vaginal health.

So, when you’re looking for a probiotic to stop those pesky yeast infections make sure it contains the above three types of bacteria…otherwise they are of no use…at least to your lady parts. Take these bacteria when you have an active infection or better yet daily to prevent one from rearing it’s ugly head.

You can find the brand I trust to meet both of these feminine needs here. With one formula, and one pill a day, Hyperbiotics is effective in supporting vaginal and urinary health. Bye bye UTI’s and yeast infections, and hello normal comfortable days.

Thank you Jena for such an informative post on a topic that’s often hard to write about! Please be sure to check out Clean’s the New Black for tips on holistic wellness, clean living, and green beauty!

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